disrupting myself, or the jump from Product Marketing to Product Management

Day 170: Squirm

We have a UX/UI intern from Germany who’s helping us improve the user experience. A few days back she sat down with one of our users to watch their process.I sat in from time-to-time (they were seated right behind me) and it was embarrassingly painful. Seeing the user get confused multiple times, have to repeat some steps to troubleshoot errors…

The temptation was to get defensive (at least in my head, everyone was trying to be nice) – I didn’t have time to think about the UX, there were more important features to build, the stakeholders were pushing for other things, the use case is different from how we first envisioned the product, UX was never in my job scope…

At some point I did my best to put a stop to it. After all, UX is something I’ve been wanting to address for a while.

Admission and acceptance of shortfalls are the first steps toward a better product – even if you had valid reasons for them. Sometimes you have to watch someone use your product, to drive home how important it is.